Experimentation in Qualitative Organization Research: Determinacy and Indeterminacy Through Walking Ethnography

Abstract

The current article explores walking ethnography as a mode of qualitative experimentation in organizational scholarship. Walking ethnographies allow researchers to experience the field in embodied ways that reflect the fluidity and unpredictability of contemporary organizational spaces. We identify and compare two ideal-typical approaches to open, ethnographic experimentation, involving a generative tension between determinacy and indeterminacy: pragmatist (inquiry-oriented) and phenocritical (drift-oriented) experimentation. These experimental forms replace the logic of confirmation of quantitative experimentation with a logic of consequences or critique. We examine how each mode of qualitative experimentation offers a unique relation to knowledge and experience. From our field work, relying on 30 discrete walking ethnographies of entrepreneurship and innovation spaces conducted between 2016 and 2020, we develop a taxonomy of eight modalities of inquiry-dérive encounters to better understand the experiential aspects appearing in moments of experimentation. By doing so, we show how qualitative research can rediscover the potentials of qualitative experimentation as a methodological impulse, particularly in the context of contemporary modes of organizing. We discuss methodological implications for the renewal of qualitative research on the basis of public experimentation and “radical openness” in research practices.